


your ship may be coming in

by Chash



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 05 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 03:53:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15258828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chash/pseuds/Chash
Summary: Post 509; the complications of not being sorry.





	your ship may be coming in

**Author's Note:**

> I know everyone has a lot of feelings about this episode, and I get it! It's cool if what I'm putting in the fic doesn't match with how you saw the episode, but please do me a favor and don't use the comments as a place to air your grievances with the episode itself. Thanks, friends!

Even after everything, her first impulse is to run to him.

It hasn't been loud, the voice in her head telling her that he's dead, but it's been persistent and just uneven enough to drive her half out of her mind, like a faucet dripping without rhythm. _Bellamy is dead_ , she'd think out of nowhere, or sometimes, _and it's your fault_.

That part she can fight back against, because it was _his_ fault, he's the one who put that thing in Madi, he's the one who wouldn't listen, wouldn't compromise, wouldn't--

He's the one who wouldn't give up on a stupid, optimistic plan, and she's the one who didn't have a better one. He's the one who poisoned his sister, and she's the one who wouldn't poison her daughter. It's not a competition, not really; there is no _person who has sacrificed the most_ award they're in contention for.

But now that he's alive, now that she's seeing him again, she can admit that she didn't want him dead. She'd had to accept that he would die, and she'd had to tell herself it was good, but it wasn't.

He's _alive_ , and that still feels like a miracle. It still feels like something she should be celebrating.

But she didn't have anything to do with this. It's not her victory.

She's the one who left him to die, the one who stayed to help her mother through detox instead of going with his friends--his _family_ \--to rescue him.

There's no place for her in this scene anymore. She could have tried to put them back together, but she didn't. She couldn't.

So she doesn't run to him, and he doesn't call for her.

Just like she wants.

*

Avoiding someone on a small patch of land with a group of less than a thousand people shouldn't be that hard, in Clarke's opinion. She could have been placed in a different settlement than he was, somewhere away from him, somewhere she'd never have to see him. It would have been easy to keep them apart.

But they're low on doctors, and she's the third-best doctor they have, so she's in the main settlement with the hospital, and Bellamy's in the main settlement too, along with everyone else she knows and is no longer able to love, because they drew lines of demarcation years ago, and Clarke's on one side and he's on the other with everyone else.

Everyone but Madi.

"You should talk to him," is her opinion.

Having the chip in her and then having it removed doesn't seem to have caused any lasting damage, and she has the memories of the commanders in the same way Clarke does; she knows the memories exist, but they're hazy and hard to access, this feeling of knowledge lost, but also knowledge she wasn't supposed to have. She doesn't recognize people she hasn't met, doesn't lapse into a kind of speech that sounds far away from herself.

She's not the same Madi she was, bur Clarke isn't the same Clarke either. After six years of almost nothing changing, they've both had to adapt in overdrive.

"I'm not going to talk to him."

"Because you're mad at him?" Clarke doesn't respond, and she persists. "Because if you're mad at him, you shouldn't be. He didn't make me do anything."

"He shouldn't have asked you in the first place."

"And?"

"And what?" Clarke snaps.

"Are you mad at him?"

She deflates all at once. She had been mad, had been furious. Had burned with it. But--whatever happened, it didn't turn out so badly for her and Madi. If Madi hadn't taken the chip, she doesn't know what would have happened to them. And that doesn't make it right, exactly, but--even before, she didn't know what else to do. She doesn't know how they could have gotten away with only one bright spot of land on the whole planet. There wasn't anywhere to escape this war.

"Yes. But not--not like I was."

"I told him you'd never forgive him. But I still want you to." 

"It wasn't fair of him to put you in that position."

"It wasn't fair of you _not_ to," Madi shoots back. "It's not fair of you to act like it's okay for you to die when I can help you. And I could. I _did_. We're all alive, and we're together again. Like you wanted."

It feels like a slap--like Bellamy must have felt--and Clarke swallows hard. "I won't apologize for not wanting you to take the chip."

"I know. You don't have to. But I _did_. And he's still here. You still have to live with him."

Clarke chokes on something like a laugh. She _has_ to live with Bellamy. Like it's some sort of punishment. Like it wouldn't be a dream come true, if not for--

Being on Earth has always been complicated. She should have known it wouldn't be so simple to get him back.

"Do you talk to him?" she asks finally, curious.

"Yeah, sometimes. I talk to all of them. They're still your friends."

Clarke has to smile. "Since when is it your job to make me feel better?"

"Since you were feeling bad." Madi worries her lip. "I don't want you to lose them over something I did."

"It's not something _you_ did. It's something he did. And something I did."

"You left him."

It's so fucking stupid. She spent six years telling herself that when he came back, things would be different, and here they are again, hurting each other and leaving each other behind. 

It shouldn't be this hard.

"I left him."

"You could talk to Raven first," Madi says, finally, and Clarke smiles.

"I could, yeah."

*

Monty is actually the easiest to talk to. Clarke thinks it's the way he doesn't feel the need to tell her she fucked up, and is content with just letting an aura of her having fucked up ooze out of his every pore. Monty radiates the feeling that Clarke has made mistakes in her life, but it doesn't feel personal. He thinks everyone has made mistakes in their lives, and he's right.

The nicest thing about Monty is that he thinks they're finally back on the right path.

"I never apologized about the algae," she says.

"What about it?"

"We never gave it a chance."

"Do you wish you had?"

"I don't know." She rubs her face. "I want to say I wasn't the problem, but--Madi tried to tell me there were good guys in Eligius, and I didn't listen. Maybe if I'd just tried talking to them--"

"Maybe." He buries his fingers in the dirt, good at farming like Clarke never was. "You weren't the only one who wasn't interested in algae either. I wasn't getting any takers."

"And now you're going to try to terraform the planet."

" _Try_ being the operative word."

"I am sorry I left you. I thought I didn't have a choice."

"I'm not sure how you would have gotten us out. Come in on the rover? Lack of guns blazing?" His smile is too soft; Clarke can't believe he can still smile like that, and Bellamy's probably part of why. Whatever he did to make space survivable, to keep them all alive. "I wanted us to be different people, and now we are. But some of us had to see how bad it could get. Before they understood we needed something better."

It's not hard to figure out who he means. "Is it bad that I still can't believe Octavia let him go? All of them."

"I don't know. I think it's good that she did, though."

"Me too." She lets out a breath. "I don't know what to say to him. I don't even know if he wants to see me again."

"He does."

It sounds so easy, when Monty says it. "But you don't know what I should say to him either."

"You're the expert, not me. But if you want someone to tell you he wants to talk to you, he does. He misses you too."

"Thanks for taking me through it."

Monty shrugs. "We don't always agree on what the best thing is. But I think you were both trying to do it."

They've disagreed before, but she never felt it so viscerally. She never felt her idea of best was so far from his.

Well, not _never_. There was a time when they didn't get along, but that didn't hurt like this. Fighting with a stranger is nothing.

"I think so too," she admits. "I still don't know what to say."

"Are you sorry?"

"Not how you think."

Monty nods. "Then say something else. Pass me the algae."

*

Echo leaves.

No one tells Clarke directly, not as something she'd care about, but she overhears Kane updating her mother-- _Echo's joined Diyoza's settlement_ \--and her heart stutters.

"So we have a free room?" Abby is asking. "Where was she staying?"

"With Emori and Murphy. I don't know if anyone else should really have to live there."

It's so many things to think about at once, and Clarke doesn't really want to think about any of them. If Echo being gone--if the fact that they didn't live together, if the fact that she's leaving and Bellamy _isn't_ \--changes things, then that's bad. Because no matter how she thought she felt about Bellamy before all this happened, it doesn't matter now.

They're not even _friends_ right now. 

But she can't help worrying. Bellamy's still around, the same as he was before, and he looks the same, from a distant. He cut his hair a little shorter, so it curls like she remembers, but he hasn't shaved. He's like some strange, hybrid Bellamy, not the old one, but not the new one either.

A totally new person she has to get to know, somehow. Once she figures it out.

"Echo left?" she asks Murphy. He feels safest.

"She and Diyoza really bonded. She said it was nice to finally meet someone on her level. She's not _gone_ ," he adds. "She's in another settlement. We'll still see her. Raven and Shaw are thinking about moving too."

"Why?"

"Probably to get away from the awkward."

She tenses. "What awkward?"

Murphy snorts. "Gee, I don't know. The twenty-foot personal bubble you decided you need around your whole life?"

" _Me_?"

To her surprise, he softens. John Murphy, showing a gentler side; she never thought she'd see the day. "Yeah, okay. Not just you. It's not like Bellamy isn't running the other way every time he thinks you might be coming his way."

She suspected, but it doesn't make anything better to have it confirmed. "See? It's not my bubble."

"He thinks you don't want to see him. You made it pretty clear. So now he's trying to do the right thing. If he's not, you should tell him. Because I'm sick of him moping."

"Thanks. I think."

"We've all fucked up," he says. "But for some reason, people love us anyway. Take it from me: try not to screw that up. It sucks."

"That's probably the nicest thing I've ever heard you say."

He shrugs. "I'm sick of you moping too."

*

The thing is, Clarke is sorry that it happened. She's sorry for the chain of events that brought the two of them to that conversation, but she's still mad. Not mad enough to want him dead, never really that mad, not deep down, but upset. She wants to not know Bellamy would do that, and she doesn't know how to talk about the fact that he did. 

So it's probably lucky that she literally runs into him. Otherwise she'd never stop putting it off.

She's out getting herbs, and he must be coming back from swimming, because what she runs into is his broad, bare chest, warm from the sun. She doesn't recognize him right away, but there is a familiarity, his scent and the feel of his arm catching her.

She jumps back and only then realizes who he is, and his name just drops from her lips. "Bellamy."

He blinks a few times. "Clarke."

She lets out a breath. "Sorry, I didn't see you."

"Yeah. I can--"

"We should talk," she blurts out.

"We don't have to."

"We don't?"

He rubs the back of his neck, the play of muscle under his skin distracting. 

All of him is distracting. She can't just turn her feelings off. She can't only see someone who hurt her, not with everything else he is too.

"I get it. You're--I'm not expecting you to forgive me." 

"Madi said she told you I wouldn't."

"She did." He works his jaw. "I'm not sorry. Not for what I did."

"I know. I'm not sorry for what I did either."

To her surprise, he smiles. "Yeah, I know."

"I don't want to be like this," she admits. It feels like too much and too little, all at once. Not enough of a confession, but too much of a concession. "I never wanted you to die. I just--"

"You couldn't save me and Madi, and you picked Madi. I know. We did what we did, Clarke. I thought Madi becoming commander would protect all of us. I was wrong. At least it protected you."

"Your sister tried to have us killed."

He rubs his face. "Fuck, O."

"But she couldn't kill you."

"It's not as comforting as you think."

She bites the corner of her mouth, and then sits in a patch of sun, careful, leaving room.

He sits with her.

"What happened? When she pardoned you."

"She pretended to have us executed and locked us up. Monty broke us out, we staged a coup--Madi shook her control, and Miller helped us find the fault lines."

"Really?"

He smiles. "I don't know what Indra said to him, but it worked the second time."

"I would have gone with them."

"If I hadn't given Madi the flame."

"No. If my mom didn't need me. She was in bad shape. I don't think she would have made it if I left."

He looks shaken. "Really?"

"I was--I still can't believe you did that. To me. Not when--I didn't kill your sister."

"I didn't kill Madi," he shoots back, but he sounds tired. "I honestly--I thought we could keep her safe, Clarke. I thought I was doing the right thing. What you would have done, if you could. If it had been anyone else."

"That wasn't your decision to make."

"It was hers. And if I could have, I would have brought you with me so you could talk her out of it. But--"

"But you had to save them."

"And you. If I'd broken you out--I don't know what would have happened. We would have still had Wonkru to deal with, and O would have wanted Madi dead just as much."

"Only choice," she says, and he barely smiles.

"I'm not sorry for what I did," he says again, like he's been rehearsing and got derailed. "But I'm sorry for how I did it. I'm sorry I couldn't--"

"I'm sorry I had to go. You wouldn't have left me."

"Clarke," he says, gentle. "I don't know what I would have done if I were you. We had our own impossible choices. You made yours, I made mine. We don't have to regret them."

"But I miss you."

She can see his throat bob as he swallows. "I miss you too." 

"I don't know what to do now."

"I was thinking maybe we don't need forgiveness anymore," he says. "Or maybe I don't."

"You don't?"

"I never had anyone tell me I was doing the right thing before you. I always felt like I was doing something wrong, even when I thought it was right. But I don't feel that way anymore."

She smiles a little. "So what do you need?"

He keeps his gaze fixed in front of him, as if he's staring at something that she can't see. But she's just looking at him. "Acceptance."

"Acceptance?"

"I accept that you left me there. I understand. You didn't do anything to be forgiven for, right?"

"No," she says, strangely breathless. "I accept that you thought Madi should take the chip. And that you told her that."

He nods. "Okay. Good."

"I'm so fucking happy you're alive," she blurts out. It's been clawing at her throat ever since he came back. "When I thought--God, Bellamy, when I thought she killed you--"

"I know." He smiles a little. "I thought you were dead for six years, Clarke. I was glad--" He clears his throat. "You were safe. And I knew you'd keep my people safe too. You could hate me, but I knew you wouldn't take it out on them."

"They hated me."

"They weren't happy with me either. Raven was almost as pissed as you were."

"For what?"

He sighs. "For getting a second chance to see you after six years and fucking it up."

"I was pissed about that too. It was so stupid, but I always thought--when you came down, things would be better."

"But they're not."

"They weren't." She wets her lips. "I think they could be."

"They're getting there." He looks over at her, eyes dark. "So, what now?"

"What do you want now?"

The question hangs in the air as he watches her, and hope grows larger in her chest the longer the silence stretches.

"This," he says.

"Which part?"

"Just--you."

"Just me?"

"Yeah. That's all."

She's surprised by the sound of her own laugh. "That's easy."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," she says, and leans in to kiss him.

And for that moment, at least, it is easy. 

She thinks they earned it.


End file.
